Quick Whit

Fragrances Lost

I'm in a writing class at the Hugo House right now- this is my first short story assignment.  Keep in mind:  it's very much a first draft.

 

My classmates don’t seem like the brightest bunch, but eager – yes, eager.  Hands fly into the air with ideas, comments, suggestions, and guesses.  I wish they’d all just shut up.  With all their talking, how’s a person supposed to learn anything?

 

We’re testing each others’ scents today.  Our first two weeks of class culminate into this:  a line-up of bottles – some blue, some green, some round, some long – and fifteen women of similar variety in shape walking up and down the aisle, squeezing past each other to sniff the next scent and the next and the next…

 

…how’s a person supposed to keep it all straight?  My nose is filled with lime zest and burgundy one minute then rose petal and chamomile the next.  My nostrils long for fresh air, a cigarette break even.  I congratulate myself for concentrating my efforts on simplicity – my scent aims to be both warm and calming, but not fancy.  No, I’ll leave fancy to the Veronicas, Monicas, and Anastasias of the world.

 

“Waverly!” the instructor chirps.  “Yours is next!”

 

I explain the concoction, a honey and mimosa fragrance.  As I announce it, I long for Sunday brunch.  Biscuits.  Bacon.  Bottomless carafes.  The stares of my classmates bring me back.

 

“Mimosa?” the Monica asks, held tilting and eyes rolling ceiling-ward.  “What’s that, like Mammography?”

 

I remember:  she’s Mormon.  There’s no use explaining.

 

I cringe as our instructor, Ms. Rose (yes, that’s her real name) leans in to take the first whiff.  She will hate it.  I just know she will.  I watch her nostrils flare open, her eyes close, her lips purse, and then…

 

…and then her eyes fly open wide and her feet carry her back two or three inches, involuntarily.  My heart sinks.  But she regains composure easily.  Brushing her hands down her apron, she invites the class to take their turn.  I look away.

 

                                    *                                                *                                                *

 

“Why couldn’t it be easy like this?” I whine to my husband the following weekend.  We’re out with the in-laws tasting wine not far from home.  In my mind’s eye, I see my classmates visiting gardens and markets, sniffing and smelling aromas far more simple than these, and yet they perplex me.

 

“I don’t understand why you put yourself through all this, Waverly.”  My husband wishes I took a cheese-making class, a cooking class, or better yet, a beer-making class.  He raises his eyebrows at me and I know what he’s thinking:  fragrances?

 

It’s been bothering me for a while, though.  Two Christmases ago, the fir tree wrapped in tinsel and gadgets just about sent my husband outdoors for the season with headaches from its strong scent.  And yet I smelled nothing.  Well, not quite nothing, but not much, and truth be told, I might have imagined even that much.  We threw out the tree on Boxing Day.

 

Two months later, the Valentine’s roses seemed almost fake in their scentlessness.  I wrote them off as just another example of how NAFTA cheapens the world.  But then my Mother-in-Law dropped by for dinner a few days later and from the moment she walked through the door, she began commenting on those roses.  “Where did you find such things?  So fragrant so early in the season?” And with a pinch to his cheek, “My son must really love you!”

 

But I smelled nothing.

 

The March edition of Science & Health landed in our mailbox like a jury verdict.  The headline?  “How Smoking Destroys the Senses.”  I rolled my eyes, but something at the base of my skull caught me.  I threw open the magazine, thirsty eyes scanning for what I already knew I would find.

 

“Dulled sense of smell.”

 

“Loss of distinction between fragrances.”

 

“Sometimes permanent.”

 

I hovered there.  Sometimes.  Not always.  But sometimes.

 

I quit smoking that summer.  Seventeen years of cigarettes before fear drove me to flush them all.  Sure enough, I discovered how quitting really was hell.  Thankfully, our wine cabinet had reached out to sustain me.

 

I stare down at the wine swirling in my glass, a generous two-ounce pour and the seventh of the day.  I smell mineral notes, kerosene, and a hint of anise.  Monica wouldn’t stand a chance here, her senses dulled by bright citrus and cheesy potatoes.  Toasting my husband, I drink it down.

 

                                    *                                    *                                    *

 

My nose comes back slowly.  Every week, I catch onto more and more of the scents Ms. Rose brings to class – first heavy patchouli and musky roses, then the more subtle smells like violets and cilantro.  I create several more fragrances of my own – mojito and currant, juniper and lime, and even hops and barley – but each new attempt fails to garner more than polite smiles from my classmates.  And so for our final project, I returned to where I began:  honey and mimosa.  I want to perfect it.

 

My husband takes his third whiff before I bolt out to the carport.  “No, I really think it’s good this time, Waverly,” he insists.  I think so too, but I don’t tell him so.  I screw the cap on tight then fly out the door.

 

Class passes like a gust of wind.  My head hurts from the bright scents Monica presents.  Veronica’s make me crave nachos, but it takes me ten minutes before I realize she might have used Jose Cuervo to make it.  Then, it’s my turn.

 

Ms. Rose steps up to my bottle, a vintage little vessel I found at the second-hand store over the weekend.  “Waverly, I hear you’re returning to an old standard?”

 

“Yes’m,” I nod, swallowing as much of my pride as I can.

 

Time slows, my heart races as I watch Ms. Rose remove the cap and wave her hand toward her nose.  A deep inhale, a lift of the eyebrows, and then…

 

…Ms. Rose breaks into a coughing fit.

 

My mouth falls open.  Liquid sloshes from the bottle before Ms. Rose can return it to the counter.  “I’m so sorry,” she says between coughs.  “It’s not the smell, I just – I just –“ and she can’t finish.  She excuses herself into the hallway, rushing to the washroom no doubt.  All the way out, she insists it’s not the scent, but judging by the looks on my classmates’ faces, I know better.

 

I find myself at the Tex-Mex bar after class.

 

                                    *                                    *                                    *

 

It has been years now since I took that class.  I smell the world as if it’s made of wine – the pink blossoms of spring, the dusty settling of earth in a rainstorm, the softness of a newborn’s skin.  I don’t even miss the cigarettes anymore.

 

My husband and I finish our brunch.  Shaking the crumbs from my lap, I inhale the salty air and melt into the view.  Today is a sunny, cool day on British Columbia’s west coast.  I reach for my husband’s arm as we wander the pier in search of a gift for his mother.  That’s how I end up in this particular perfumerie.

 

The smells take me right back to that class – some too bright to please, and some to heavy to delight.  I strike up a conversation with the owner, a wrinkled waif of a woman.

 

“My my my, you really seem to know a lot about fragrances,” she says.

 

I blush.  “Ms. Rose wouldn’t agree.”  I sigh and turn to the next bottle when my husband steps forward and begins to boast about my scent.  “Original,” he calls it.  “Like a calm mid-spring morning, without all the allergies.”

 

“A mornin’ like this one?” the owner jokes.  Her finger flies skyward.  “Wait!  We have somethin’ not too different from what you’re describin’.  Hold yourselves here a moment.”

 

Moving without the slightest hint of ease, she disappears in the back.  I raise my eyebrows at my husband, and to my surprise, I see him leaning far over the counter, eager.  I join him.

 

“Here it is!  Found it!” the owner squeals, popping out from the storeroom with a bottle high overhead.  “I been hidin’ this one back there for a while now.  Can’t seem to keep ‘em in stock, but I like ‘em too much to let ‘em all go.  Makes for a great bath oil, I tell ya.”

 

She uncaps the lid and slides the bottle over to my husband.  Nostrils flared, he leans in.  “Holy shit!” he says, waving me over.

 

I rub my nose to clear it of the lilac I just whiffed.  My husband grins like it’s Christmas and hands over the bottle.  I nod as I raise it to my face.  And then…

 

…biscuits!  Bacon!  And bottomless carafes.  “It’s my scent!  Baby, it’s my scent!”

The Only Real Question

Ten years ago this fall, I sat at a study carrel in the law school library at Roger Williams University.  My eyes ran across line after line of one court decision or another, my pink highlighter spewed fumes into the air, but I read nothing.  The knot in my stomach had long since solidified into a gnawing sort of dread.  I didn’t want this, law school.  I didn’t want to jump through hoop after hoop to survive my first year, only to be rewarded with a second year, and then a third, graduating thereafter with $50,000 or more in student debt only to be rewarded with the bar exam, one or two attempts at which might land me a career as, gasp, an attorney.  What the hell was I doing?  Who was I trying to be?

 

I slammed the book shut, civil procedure or criminal defense or whatever it was that demanded my time but not my heart that day.  Stuffing my backpack, nearly toppling over at the weight of it when I threw it over my shoulder, I slid out of the library, out of the law school, and across campus to the other library – the real library where real students studied and learned such topics as art history and political theory and algebra and biology.  I found comfort walking through the aisles of books there, each shelf brimming with books I couldn’t hate because they required nothing of me.  I loved them for this.  I ran my fingers across their spines, silence ringing in my ears but frustration screaming in my head.  Rounding a corner, I came across the Featured Books part of the library, a series of books displayed atop a low shelf.  That’s when I saw it, the book by Po Bronson that would offer me a way out.  It’s title?  What Should I do with my Life?

 

It’s a question that has haunted me ever since I gave up my dream of being a professional flutist, a question that continues to haunt me even now.  You see, I haven’t experienced such a purpose-filled few months as my first semester of college, my freshman year.  Studying music, I could see my entire life laid out ahead of me in neat, tidy rows.  I would finish my undergrad degree, go to grad school, become a professor, teach other aspiring musicians, play in an orchestra, record some albums, and fit everything else life could offer into the cracks in between.  All that was required of me was time and effort.  And money.  Lots of it.  But I loved it – locking myself in a practice room three to six hours a day, working a composition in and out until I could play it almost without thought.  Time and effort came easily then.  But money didn’t.

 

And so, for reasons too numerous and painful to list here, my dream couldn’t become reality.  With a great deal of mourning and bitterness, I let it go, I let music slide out of my focus and into the periphery alongside everything else.  I floundered my way to two undergraduate degrees that meant little to me and instead, found comfort in telling people neither mattered because, “I’m going to law school anyway.”

 

No one who has tasted passion can spend much time on a path so far from their heart.

 

I checked out the book, returned (feeling rebellious) to the exact same study carrel I had abandoned less than an hour before, and I began my first honest attempt at answering the haunted question.  I skipped class, caught a ride home, and locking myself in my bedroom, I kept reading.  My mind worked, fitting myself in and out of various career paths mentioned in the book.  My heart worked too – could I find myself in these pages?

 

Less than a month later, I withdrew from law school, taking with me $12,000 in worthless student debt and trying to ignore the sense of failure lurking beneath my brain stem.  My colleagues would cross me out of the student roster like they had all the others who dropped out during their first year.  I would return to my parent’s house almost 3,000 miles away with no job, no plan, and no pride.  Even now, I feel unsettled thinking back on it all.  But here’s one of the many ways I knew I made the right choice:  my class graduated in May 2008; the economy crashed that fall; and so, rather than studying for a bar exam in hopes of landing the increasingly-rare entry-level job at a half-decent firm while interest stacked up on my student loans, I had built in those first years out of law school a resume worthy of landing me a job stable enough to hire a real estate agent.

 

While my former classmates studied for the bar, I bought my first house.

Reclaiming Balance by Embracing Mornings

Deep into my doubts over whether I would be able to sustain my newly-reclaimed passion for writing once I return to the workforce, I stumbled across an article posted by a Facebook friend who lives half a world away.  Reading it filled my sails with wind.  It gave me new tools to sculpt a new future, one in which I hope to win the struggle for a balanced life rather than nearly kill myself trying.  It all hinges on one critical change, however:  making myself into a morning person.

 

What?  Me?  A morning person?  You see, left entirely to my own devices, I would stay up all night.  There is a magical moment right around one o’clock in the morning when everything is clear and quiet and exciting and brilliant.  I love finding myself there, though admittedly, I seldom go there anymore.  And not because I don’t want to – I often think about and long for that magical time.  But over the course of the past six months away from work, I’ve discovered something else, something far less exciting but equally magical:  time passes significantly more slowly between six and eleven o’clock in the morning than it does later in the day.  Sometime after eleven a.m. the current picks up and slides me to four o’clock, a mad race through dinnertime, and when I finally catch up with the day, it’s eight o’clock and I am exhausted.

 

Of course it’s an illusion – how can seconds be longer during one part of the day than the rest?  Maybe my mind just moves faster and so I’m more efficient; maybe distractions are fewer when the day dawns than as it progresses; maybe my energy level wanes even if I don't feel like it does.  Whatever the explanation, this much I know:  if I don’t accomplish the top two or three things I need to do in a day before the clock strikes noon, odds are high that the day will end up wasted.  It’s an uphill battle thereafter.

 

Enter this article whose author, upon becoming a father, finds it difficult to keep up his writing alongside his full-time job.  He read about monks, sleeping just four to six hours per night, rising well ahead of sunrise.  A month at a time, he began to change his sleeping schedule.  Now, he rises between three and four o’clock in the morning, gets his writing done, goes to work, and enjoys family life in the evenings, none of which he could fully accomplish before.  He offers seven morning rituals that make it all possible, but I’m condensing them into the five that I hope will work for me.  Perhaps they’ll work for you too, or will offer you ideas on the two, three, or nine rituals that will turn your dreams, your life-projects, into reality.

 

1. Yoga:  or jogging or any other type of exercise that might get the blood flowing.  It’s a great way to wake the body and ease into the next ritual…
2. Meditation:  he chooses a tea meditation, too worried about falling asleep by meditating so soon after rising.  I drink tea in the mornings too; in fact, I find it the most comforting way to start a day.  So his type of meditation appeals to me, but the point is that any meditation at all works because studies show that people who meditate regularly require less sleep.  Plus there’s the added benefit that meditation brings to the creative life – but more on that later.
3. Get creative:  read a chapter in a book or an article in a magazine, but make it good.  Journal, perhaps.  Study a work of art.  Add a few brush strokes to your own painting.  Tap into your creative side in whatever ways you can, but keep it brief.
4. Write:  this is the work of the day.  This is the stuff that, should I wait until after work, I will be too tired to approach and, over time, would grow to resent.  I know this because I’ve tried before, and failed.  Since publishing a novel is one of my lifelong dreams, it has to come first.  And even if I only write a page, or a mere paragraph – well, by the time I have breakfast, I will already have done the thing I wish most to accomplish in the day.
5. Breakfast, dress, go to work:  awake and accomplished.

 

Of course it’s wishful thinking – dreams, by their very nature, can be nothing else - and of course I'll be nodding off by nine at night.  But by now I know that moving forward a tiny bit at a time, slogging without vision, placing one foot in front of the other, dreams can come true.  So already, I’m rising well before seven each morning even though nothing in my daily schedule requires it yet.  Next week, I plan to rise at six.  And perhaps by the end of April, I'll wake up closer to five.  I doubt I’ll ever become a three a.m. riser, but hey, you never know.

 

You can read the full article HERE.

Rewrite Complete!

Now that I’m done dancing around the house, I think I might be able to sit still long enough to blog:  MY REWRITE IS DONE.

 

I always hoped I possessed enough wit, drive, and focus to finish writing a book – a first draft, to be specific – but I admit, I never thought I could do a second draft.  And by second draft, I mean a rewrite.  I have completely written two interdependent drafts of one novel, start to end and from the inside out.  Twice!  The second time around, I even filled in all the gaps, all the holes in research and depth that I left open the first time because I feared that filling them might derail the entire project.  Now, the novel is complete, whole.  And though my education on all-things-writing and all-things-WWII will continue, I’m no longer starting from scratch.

 

A friend once told me, when for the hundredth time he listened to me whine about not being able to come up with anything worth writing about:  “JUST WRITE.”  I scrawled his advice on a piece of paper, taped it to my wall, and ignored it.  It can’t possibly be so simple, I decided.  In some ways, I was right:  a certain amount of road-mapping is necessary before writing can make much sense.  But mostly, he was right:  the day-in, day-out work of the past six months of my life has been the refusal to let my fingers stop typing, at least not for any great length of time.  Word by word, page by page, day by day, I birthed two full drafts of a novel.  Little ol’ me.  (With, of course, a healthy nod to the elusive Muse that daily decides whether to grace an artist to leave them to their own demise.  Mine has been generous.)

 

So what I’m left with is this:  a solid, sturdy sense that nothing is quite as impossible as it seems; that confidence is more blind faith than anything else; that any great task, when broken into daily chunks of various sizes, can be accomplished.  Because guess what?  The days pass anyway, and the momentum of time can carry a project to its end.

 

Now for the stats:

 

• First draft:  117,000 words
• Rewrite:  126,000 words (in spite of massive cuts)

 

• First draft:  243 Word Doc pages
• Rewrite:  260 Word Doc pages (precisely the number I long ago predicted)

 

The third draft, when it begins, will have two major goals:

1. Deepen
2. Cut 20%

But in the meantime, I’m taking a break from it all.  I’m embarking on a new career path.  I’m training myself to incorporate writing into daily life alongside work and family.  Impossible?  Well, I’ve certainly been told THAT before.

Changes Ahead

I will finish my rewrite this week – probably in two or three days – and in spite of how sloggish it felt, it will end up taking only two weeks longer to write than my first draft took.  Thirteen weeks instead of eleven.  And considering I lost a whole week to the flu, and the holidays happened, I suppose it wasn’t that slow at all.  Worth it?  Yes – this draft is infinitely better than the first.  I’m even starting to love it.

 

So what's next?  Many things, in fact.  Given the interest expressed by the agents I met with last month, I want to keep working and reworking the novel until it exceeds my best expectations.  In order to do that, I will be taking some writing classes, adding new ideas to my admittedly-limited palate and, ideally, building myself into a community of writers at the Hugo House.  But all of this won’t kick off for more than a month.  In the meantime?

 

First, I’m taking a break from the book.  I will keep writing – perhaps by blogging more often? – but I need to let the book rest.  I need a fresh perspective.  I need to work through it in my subconscious, I need to ignore it, I need to reboot my creativity.  And in spite of how much fun I've had with the rewrite lately, I am so so so excited for the break!  Then the class, the third draft, and so on.

 

Second (get ready for it):  I’m going back to work.  What?  Work?  Full-time work?  Yes, and guess what?  I’m excited about this too!  The right opportunity came along, the right combination of factors made me a top candidate for an admittedly LARGE job, and so, I’m diving in head-first, moving from the heartbreaking world of politics into the significantly more creative world of communications and marketing.  I have the chance to recreate my career – what a thrill!  Imagine me dancing around my home office and it’ll be almost like you’re here.

 

The timing is right:  the rewrite will be done, I’m taking a break from it anyway, our household budget and savings accounts are nearly in tatters, I miss having an income in a BIG way, and I really can't imagine a better fit for the next chapter of my career; I think, in fact, I may have written those very words into my cover letter.

 

More details will come in the days and weeks ahead, but suffice it to know that big changes loom and I am clicking my heels about them all.

 

These past six months?  Entirely worth it!

Writer's Got Talent

One segment of last weekend’s writing workshop contained an America’s-Got-Talent-inspired contest of first-page critiques.  Any writer present who wanted to have the first page (double-spaced) of their novel reviewed could enter the contest and all entrants were kept anonymous.  Here’s how it worked:  the workshop host read the page aloud while five literary agents read along.  When an agent reached a point in the writing where they would stop reading, or at least hesitate to continue, thereby deeming the entire work unworthy of their time, they would raise their hand.  When a second agent rose their hand too, the reading ceased and critique commenced.

 

The agents were brutal, and by brutal, I mean honest and frank in all the necessary ways.  The font is bad, this person neglected to indent their work, the writer gives no sense of where in time we are, this is a totally unbelievable plot line, and the most common:  do not give back-story on the first page!  Keep the action moving!

 

Of course I participated, so how did I do?  Well, like so many others, I fell victim to that last critique, and so, much to my disappointment, they stopped reading two sentences into my second paragraph.  Heartbreak!  But I did manage to get one of the best compliments of the entire contest:  the panel unanimously loved my first sentence.  Well, it’s a start.

 

And so, I present to you my first page, as entered into last weekend’s contest.  It has plenty of reworking in store, but it’s not a half-bad way to start, and now I have better ideas on how to make it shine.  Enjoy:

 

     The sky – all breath and currents – tugged at my cheeks and roared past my ears as my body sliced through it, aimed for the earth below.  Could I have expected it to feel this way, jumping from a plane?  Tears rushed to my eyes, not from fear or sadness or the sense of doom I maybe should have felt, but for no other reason than that the wind whipped them dry as it pummeled my face.  Panic:  I felt none.  Thoughts:  I had many, the loudest being, this feels nothing like falling.

 

     It brought me back to summer afternoons on the farm back home, afternoons that at any second could be ripped in half by sudden storms.  We would outrun them, Bud and I, speeding along in his truck past blurry fields of ripening alphalpha.  Even now, I can taste the lightning in the back of my mouth, sour and metallic between my molars.  No storm loomed that day though, as I tore through the sky.  No clouds, no weather.  An entirely perfect day but for the Germans, recognized too late.

 

     I began to entertain a notion that the great cushion of air on which I rode would guide me away from this place and my awaiting fate, carrying me over the Atlantic and across the vast expanse of continent that separated me from home.  This comforted me, even as I somersaulted in and out of blinding sunlight.  Overhead, the atmosphere expanded outward with smoke and flame and bits of plane.  Or other men.  My crewmates, perhaps.  Below:  a wide river, as blinding at times as the sun.  Plane engines crying in pain, the unsettling sounds of war, faded amidst the clamor of wind in my ears.  I felt alone and this, too, comforted me.  I spun to backward once more and watched as a sickening ball of orange light appeared where my plane had been.  I had to close my eyes.

How I Came Across the Opportunity to Pitch an Agent

As I mentioned previously, I met with two agents last weekend to pitch them my novel, and graciously, both expressed interest in seeing it once it’s finished.  Though I had only ten minutes to speak with each, I took many things away from our conversations, the best being: an ounce more confidence than I’ve ever had before as a writer.  I’m on the right track, and someday, this book will be published.

 

In the past few days, some people have asked me how I came about the opportunity to pitch an agent so I thought it might be helpful to share my answer here.  It started with a tight budget and a new years’ resolution:  my grace period for going without work is definitely in its final phase, and I knew this coming into 2015.  Dying were my aspirations to self-publish the novel – I would need professional help, I decided, if I ever really want to see it when I walk into Barnes & Noble (and I do!).  So, I set a resolution to publish my novel this year:  ambitious and far-fetched, but if you don’t try your darnedest, you don’t get anywhere now do you?

 

So there it was.  In the early days of January, I started my research.  I looked at the spines of my favorite books and followed each publisher I saw on Twitter.  I started looking for addresses:  where could I mail a sample of my novel so that a publisher might pick it up?  RED LIGHT.  You cannot mail your manuscript to a publisher and hope it will end up in print someday.  I mean, you can.  Nothing is stopping you.  But it won’t work.  Maybe, maaaaaaybe a small publishing house with in-house agents/readers will stick it on a desk before filing it in the trash can, but Penguin, Random House?  Forget it.

 

So, I asked Google, how does a person get published anyway?  Which led me to a great number of articles on the importance of having an agent in order to be published.  Oh yes, an agent – I already knew this but somehow forgot it.  Isn’t that life?  So I looked in the Acknowledgements section of my favorite books and found the names of some agents. I Googled them:  they’re all in New York.  I looked in some of my more local books and found some more agents:  still all in New York.  I began to panic because, sure, you can mail your manuscript to an agent and have at least a mild expectation that it will be read, but everything online (and my gut instinct) tells me I need to meet an agent in person if for no other reason than to demonstrate that I’m not just another insane wannabe author like they deal with every single day.  And I can’t fly to New York; the budget just won’t allow it.

 

So, hi there Google, tell me how a Seattleite meets a literary agent without leaving town.  And voila, I found yet another piece of information to which I already knew the answer but had forgotten:  attend a writing workshop with agents present.  Yes, yes I can do this.  Seattle has no shortage of writing conferences.  Just one more problem:  they can be very expensive.  And none of them happen in January.

 

A bit of online digging brought me to Chuck Sambuchino’s Seattle Writing Workshop, the perfect confluence of timeline (coming in February!), content (agents available to hear your pitch!), and pricing (only $129, plus $29 per agent-pitch!).  To say the opportunity was too good to refuse is to understate it.  And in retrospect, I would have paid twice as much (just don’t tell that to Chuck) – the value of the workshop exceeded expectations on all fronts, contained the most relevant information on how to get published, and opened doors I never thought I could open on my own.  Plus the confidence thing.

 

Long story short:  do you have a lifelong dream?  Pick a year to get it done, start your research, meet some people, and go from there.  The internet can direct you to resources you haven’t even imagined.  (Or otherwise forgot.)

No Sick Days for the Sick

I’m back, finally.  I went missing this week, even to myself.  After a lovely weekend of Valentining, Symphony attending, hiking, exploring, and visiting family, I put my Mother on an airplane, came home, and crashed.  Mostly, I felt tired, and that was to be expected:  I had a big week ahead of me.  But by the middle of Tuesday night, I could no longer swallow, and by morning, the fever started.

 

I don’t know what kind of virus snatched me up this time, but it fought a mean fight.  On the first day, everything ached.  My throat was too swollen to swallow anything without causing me to writhe in pain, but I forced my way through a bowl of soup – over the course of three hours with a nap in between – and a few cups of tea.  I whimpered and I slept.  I ached too much to sit down and hadn’t strength enough to stand up, so I laid.  Eventually, even my ability to think gave way to the fever – reading became impossible, writing more so.

 

Yesterday, the throat pain eased, though by no means made swallowing a welcome activity.  The fever raged not as an ever-present monster but as stress-induced hot flashes instead.  And when I say ‘stress-induced,’ I mean any endeavor that required thought:  canceling my book club (it was my turn to host) = sweated through my clothing; answering a phone call (will I come in for a second interview?  YES.) = sweated through my clothes again, had to lie down.  But the aching had eased, except in my head and neck.  Every time I lifted my eyebrows, I felt the resistance of a brick in my forehead.  Ouch.

 

All this during such a critical week!  Wednesday, I had to cancel lunch with a friend, mentor, and potential employer, as well as reschedule a job interview – both of which I had been excited about for weeks.  Canceling book club killed me – I am lucky enough to be in the most fabulous of book clubs and our monthly gatherings are almost worth showing up to sick or even dying.  Amazing women.  And tomorrow:  the day I meet with two agents and try to sell them on the idea of my book.  TOMORROW.

 

So how do I feel today?  Well, I have managed to write now four paragraphs while sweating through my clothes only once.  The headache is gone except when I climb stairs.  I ate breakfast for the first time since falling ill, and in less than forty minutes too!  I think, with a little care and a lot of tea, I will be ready to roll for tomorrow.  I just have a lot to prepare today, slowly and in small bursts when I find the energy.  Like now, in writing this blog post. 

 

Wish me luck.

Drafting the Pitch

So January slipped into February, the Seahawks lost the Super Bowl, another plane tumbled from the sky somewhere in Asia, and I am now approaching page 150 of my rewrite.  I expect to be done with Draft Two in four weeks, give or take, and then I’ll let it rest.  I will leave the novel alone, ignore it, try to forget about it for six to eight weeks before I work on it again.  And then, I’ll read it for the very first time.  All of it.  I hope at that point not to hate it… at least, not too much.

 

In the meantime, I am meeting with some agents two weeks from now.  Agents?  Yes, agents – one from a publishing house in Portland and another from an agency in New York.  I don’t know entirely what to expect from the meetings – at best, I’ll land a book deal; at worst I’ll be told to give up my writing career altogether; but really, I imagine the result will be somewhere in between.  “Good luck, contact us when you’re actually done and ready to publish,” or “We’re not really looking for that type of book right now, but keep us posted on your progress anyway.”  Regardless of the outcome, I have to do this.  I have to know what it is like.  I have to see myself in the eyes of agents like them and hear what they have to say.

 

In preparation, I’m working on my pitch.  Here’s what I have so far:

 

When his B-17 bursts into flames during World War II, LaMar Whittier – a farmboy from rural Idaho – finds himself alone on German soil with no idea how he’ll escape or whether he’ll survive.  What he discovers as he crosses enemy lines will change him forever.

Two years earlier, LaMar defied his father’s wishes and joined the US Army Air Force, leaving home in search of adventure and determined to prove himself a man.  His dreams of piloting warplanes quickly dissolved into nightmarish missions high above German-occupied territory.  Little could he have known just how short-lived his combat career would be.  Now, as he trudges through Germany, Luxembourg, and onto France, he is forced to grapple not only with devastating thirst and hunger, but also with questions about courage, failure, and the will to go on.  Instincts cultivated by years of farming and hunting keep him alive in spite of having to navigate some of the most treacherous obstacles of the war – Germany’s Westwall and the Maginot Line in France.  Will he survive?  Will be captured?  Will the love of his life back home give him up for dead?

Seventh Mission is a 130,000-word historical realist novel based on my grandfather’s experiences during World War II.  Falling on the literary scale somewhere between Unbroken and The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the novel will appeal to readers of both the literary fiction and non-fiction genres.

 

Keep in mind, I’ve never written a pitch before – I really don’t know what I’m doing.  I want to make it more exciting, and that’s my plan for this week, to rework it until it sparkles.  Mostly, I don’t want to give too much away because, even in the second draft, the book continues to morph as it matures, becoming something greater than just another war story.  Do I have the talent to rise to its greatness?  Only time will tell.

Anybody Home?

What happened?  Where did I go?  Has my blog gone silent?

 

Rest easy folks, all two or three of you who read regularly.  I am still around, still picking my way through a rewrite, and still trying to drag inspiration out of all corners of the internet.  And literature.  Sadly, literature has disappointed me as of late.  After finishing “The Luminaries,” I find myself unimpressed by what I’ve read since, namely “A Sense of an Ending” and “The Finkler Question.”  I’m onto “Wolf Hall” now, so wish me luck.

 

As I’ve mentioned before, the rewrite is a slog.  It’s a lot of work.  Some days, I feel like I make such little progress that I consider stopping for good.  I admit it:  I’ve had a few days this month where I did, in fact, stop.  I would sit at my computer and outright reject the document in front of me, opening instead survey after survey to earn measely points toward an iTunes gift card.  (Seriously, when they say you can make money doing surveys online, they’re lying… unless you consider earning $2.00/hour in gift cards “making money.”)  Somewhere along the way, I lost perspective.  I forgot that two pages a day adds up and four pages a day adds up even quicker.  And suddenly, here it is the end of January and I’m 110 pages into my rewrite somehow.  So it’s a slog, but guess what?  It’s happening – it’s actually happening!

 

What a process it is – I’ve managed to cut out four scenes entirely, merge six or seven scenes into one another, and when accounting for one added scene, I am still at about the same page count as the first draft.  I’m still on pace.  The math makes no sense, but I suppose when one’s goal is to add depth to their writing, it also adds length.  We’ll wait until the third draft to decide whether such length is worthwhile…

 

So what have I been up to?  Well, I admit it.  It is time to reenter the workforce.  My pot of funds is running dry and words cannot express how badly I miss having an income.  Consequently, much of the time I would otherwise be composing blog posts I now spend drafting cover letters.  Similar activities, blogging and cover lettering:  as with drafting a post, a serious amount of soul-searching goes into the job hunt.  But more on that another day.

 

In the meantime, for those of you who enjoyed this post, here is its back-story:  Enjoy!